They gathered in a 100-year-old Gothic church-turned-recording studio a few blocks from the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville. Eighty-five musicians with brass, wind, and percussion circulated the sanctuary, contributing to a unique task: recording a song worthy of the grand return of the college football video game.
Outside, a spring storm thundered and cicadas sang ceaselessly. Inside, an orchestra created “Campus Clash,” the theme song for EA Sports College Football 25, one of the most anticipated sports video games of the past decade.
Steve Schner, Electronic Arts’ global music executive and president, felt that the game’s revival would require unique tracks that stayed true to the sport’s traditional sound. He enlisted Emmy Award-winning composer Chris Bowers to create arrangements and assemble an orchestra to create original songs that stand out from the game’s extensive library of battle songs and agitators.
Video game soundtracks can quickly become a thing of the past as players immerse themselves in a game for hours. They need to be not only tolerable, but replayable. That’s especially true for College Football 25, which was released this week, 11 years after the last NCAA football game.
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“Campus Clash” features a powerful brass melody and funky drumline beats, making it a great hype-building theme for a primetime game broadcast, but Schnur is adamant that nostalgia isn’t the only factor.
“This is not going to sound like the band you heard at a marching band stadium in 1985 or 2005,” he said.
Two thousand miles from Nashville, Bowers listened to the recording while working in his studio in Los Angeles. Best known for composing music for films such as “Green Book,” “The Color Purple,” and Netflix’s hit show “Bridgerton,” Bowers is also a video game veteran. He has composed music for the previous two versions of Madden and is also composing the main theme for the upcoming Madden 25 and NHL 25 games.
Bowers, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard, didn’t have much exposure to the sounds of college sports as a student, as the prestigious performing arts school didn’t have athletic teams. To write something that fit the game’s atmosphere, he studied the sounds of college marching bands. Schnoor sent him the game’s fight song, and Bowers said he “borrowed little drumline phrases that would be fun” to get a feel for the original composition.
“It’s definitely a mix of different sounds, but the most important thing for us was to balance the classic football themes that we’ve heard so far with a slightly more modern feel that’s different from what we’ve heard on TV for decades,” Bowers said.
To achieve this, Bowers focused on hip-hop songs that use brass melodies, taking inspiration from modern tracks with marching bands. Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance, which was a tribute to HBCUs, and Mystikal’s “Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against The Wall)” were two big sources of inspiration.
Bowers begins his composition process by pinpointing the emotion of the scene (or in this case, the game). He wants the piece to make him feel the same way. Composing for video games can be difficult because there are no narrative beats to guide changing sounds or punctuation notes like in shows and movies. For this release, it was all about creating something that gamers can get excited about.
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The goal is to have these themes take root in college football culture beyond the boundaries of the game.
“I hope that in the future, other bands will record their own versions of it,” Bowers said. “Now that we have this version, I want the melody of the theme and the main melodic aspects to stay around, but I also want it to have a life of its own in terms of how it’s played and performed going forward. Ideally, if people really embrace it, we’ll be able to celebrate other schools doing their own versions.”
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(Chris Bowers Photo: Unique Nicole/Getty Images, The Recording Academy)
